Welcome to IETF 90!

We are there now for the 10th time. And for the second time in Toronto, our previous visit being exactly 20 years ago!

The meeting next week is shaping up to be an exciting and well-attended meeting. We already have over 1358 registered attendees and the numbers are growing.

The host for this meeting is Ericsson. I am of course very happy about their support, which is important for the meeting arrangements. I am also happy that the wireless industry in general continues to be very active in developing Internet technology. The number of mobile broadband connections to the Internet is expected to grow from 2 to 7 billion by the end of this decade. Much work remains on not just setting up the accesses, building the devices, but also making the Internet technology and services suited for the even more diverse situations that it will have to run in.

But back to the meeting. Our connectivity sponsor is Telus, the welcome reception sponsor is Microsoft, the beverage break sponsor is National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the ice cream social sponsor is Afilias. Many thanks to our host and the sponsors; we could not have a quality meeting without your strong support.

I also wanted to provide a couple of highlights on what I think are interesting next week:

• BoFs – The many new work proposals or “Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF)” sessions that we have this time. My particular favourites are UCAN which is about automating even more about network configuration and DTNWG which is about standardising a delay-tolerant-networking protocol after years of research. Read more about the BoFs in a separate article.

• IANAPLAN – The IANAPLAN meeting will discuss how the IETF should deal with the transition of NTIA’s stewardship of IANA functions to the global Internet community (such as the IETF). My personal belief is that for the IETF, the transition is relatively easy, because offer the years we have built up the agreements, processes, groups, and RFCs that define how we work together with IANA.

• RTGAREA – The Routing Area has been discussing various options for restructuring the working groups in the area to enable more efficient and focused work. The Routing ADs will be available to discuss the options all week including in their office hours on Sunday afternoon, and the Routing Area open meeting on Thursday afternoon will spend time debating the issues.

• YANG – One of the interesting topic sin the Operations and Management area is YANG. In the industry there is a growing interest for configuration management with YANG modules. On Sunday, the YANG session, the YANG doctors will be available to provide advice on your YANG models. This session is not a tutorial on how to design YANG models and use NETCONF, but a place to get feedback on your data modeling questions, language usage questions, tools to use, and so on.

• Bits-n-Bites – This event has changed quite a bit from previous ones. To begin with we have a theme – Internet-of-Things for this meeting. Join us on Thursday evening for the new Bits-and-Bites event! The sponsor for this are A10 Networks, Afilias, Alcatel-Lucent, iMinds, Canadians Internet Registration Authority, Cisco, Comcast,  FIT/IoT-Lab,  netDEF, RIOT, and . Thank you!

• LLN plugfest – As may be obvious from the above, many IETFers work on the Internet-of-Things topic. In addition to working on specifications during working group sessions, they often arrange interoperability test events. The Low-Power-and-Lossy networking event runs on Sunday, join the test!

• Privacy – Our efforts to improve the privacy and security of Internet communications continue, for instance in the TLS, HTTPBIS, UTA, and TCPINC meetings.

I look forward to the meeting in Toronto. I would like to welcome you all to the meeting! And if you have not signed up yet, you can still register.